Man Bound To Tree Has Right Hand Cut Off In 14th Century Blood Feud

No one would mistake the Calendar of Patent Rolls for scintillating reading. These open government documents began to be recorded in 1201, during the reign of King John of England. The rolls were originally written in Latin on parchment; this documentary tradition continues through to today, although it is now done in English using more modern methods. Within the volumes of minor infractions, pardons granted, knightships awarded, and other daily administrative information, though, occasionally something salacious jumps out.

On February 12, 1327, Richard de Holebrok complained to authorities in Westminster that a mob composed of 84 people “assaulted him at Tatyngston, co. Suffolk, bound him to a tree and cut off his right hand.” What Holebrok did to provoke his attackers, many of whom he specifically names in his complaint, remains tantalizingly unknown. But bioarchaeologist Simon Mays, writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Paleopathology, thinks he has found Holebrok’s remains.

The Blackfriars friary in Ipswich was excavated in the early 1980s, and 250 burials were found. One of them, burial 1904, is of a male in his 30s and has a healed amputation of the right hand. Not far from Ipswich lies Tattingstone, where the Holebrok family were local gentry, and the friary excavation revealed floor tiles with the Holebrok family crest. Healed amputations, Mays writes, “are rarely seen in Mediaeval burials, only a handful of examples being known in over 50,000 burials excavated from Mediaeval sites in England.” Based on the circumstantial evidence, Mays believes that burial 1904 is that of Richard de Holebrok.

Richard de Holebrok's arms, showing the amputation of his right hand. (Photo used with kind permission of Simon Mays, Historic England.)

The reasons for these known amputations usually fall into one of three categories: following disease or injury, as judicial punishment, or as the result of sharp trauma. There is no evidence that the Ipswitch burial ground, Mays writes in another article on the topic, is associated with a hospital, so surgical amputation is unlikely.

Corporal punishment in the Medieval period was rarely used on criminals in Europe and tended to consist of flogging or branding, but Mays notes that "in the late Middle Ages, the severing of a limb was a very infrequent penalty, reserved for those who tried to interfere with the functioning of the King's court." It is unclear, though, how the punishment was carried out. Mays found records that mention a knife that was hammered into the limb with a mallet, and subsequent cauterization of blood vessels with a hot iron. In the days before anesthesia, this would indeed have been painful punishment.

Medieval weapons were strong and sharp enough to sever a limb, and the level of violent crime in the Medieval period was quite high. "In England," Mays writes, "men carried arms routinely: the lower classes knives, the gentry swords." Given the names listed in the Patent Rolls as parties to the attack on Holebrok, Mays speculates that "the affair sounds like a result of a blood feud between members of the upper classes and their followers; this type of feuding bedevilled Medieval England."

Holebrok’s amputated hand was well healed, so Mays turned his attention to his shoulder blades in order to better understand the nature of the mob attack. On the left side, the scapula has two well-healed fractures that intersect in the glenoid cavity, or the socket part of the ball-and-socket joint of the shoulder, and a third fracture running down the the bone. On the right side, another fracture was so severe it caused parts of the bone to separate and to unite improperly. In addition, perforations in the shoulder blades are also the result of the fracturing, and there is a healed fractured on one of the left ribs. Considering these injuries are all well-healed, they likely occurred at the same time.

Mays writes that “the location of the injuries on the upper parts of the scapular body and on the scapular spine suggests blunt force blows from above/behind the victim” as do the fractures to the glenoid cavity. The rib was more likely fractured by a blow to the middle back, but it is unclear if this was also the result of the mob attack.

While Richard of Holebrok is not nearly as famous as that other Richard whose skeleton was intently studied in order to figure out events surrounding his death, the most traumatic event he suffered during his lifetime has been revealed through his skeletal remains, archaeological evidence, and historical documents.